5:56:00 PM 11 April 2007
Melbeyorne
The Easter weekend was spent in Melbourne, where Kavitha kindly put us up in her new place in sunny Auburn. Briony has already covered the weekend in some detail, so I'll just add a few scrappy bits of commentary.
Melbourne itself looks and feels a lot more like a European city. Looking out over the rooftops, you wouldn't be hard-pressed to imagine it looked a bit like London. That said, the centre of the city is pretty cosmopolitan. The Eureka tower, dominating the Melbourne skyline, bears more than a passing resemblance to the Half-Life 2 citadel. Woo, spooky.
Something which did surprise me was the National Gallery of Victoria. Sitting somewhere in-between a museum and an art-gallery, it was pretty accessible (even the modern art), and the free entry helped too. This means I'll be getting up off my rear and visiting a few galleries here, too. I think I'll start with the MCA - it's open late on Wednesday nights, so that'll be a good time to take a wander through.
I'll accompany Briony along to the occasional Church service (trying to learn a bit more about what it's all about, that sort of thing), and the Easter service at Sts Peter and Paul in South Melbourne with Father Bob was an education unto itself. Fr. Bob is very much more a caricature of himself in real-life than what you see on the TV or hear on the radio.
The enduring memory I'll have is of the elderly, but terrifyingly fast, Fr. Bob running up and down the aisles with his little smoke generating thingo during a hymn. He terrorises unsuspecting members of his congregation, and he doesn't mind speaking his mind. The man is a law unto himself, he gets people thinking, and that's a good thing to see :)
9:42:00 PM 7 December 2006
HDR tomfoolery
Last post for the day - I've really got to head out soon. Big hello to both my brother-in-law and water-fowl obsessed brother who are in town visiting from Europe.
After handing in the draft, I walked from Gladesville to Pyrmont. Along the way, I upgraded my photo geek level by going from panorama to HDR imaging.
There are oodles of filters out there to tone-map acquired 32- or 48-bit images back down to formats viewable on ordinary screens.
On the left is the Fattal filter, on the right, the Drago filter. The awesome thing about all of this high-range geekery is that the images above were 100% processed under linux, which makes a refreshing change. I'll write-up how that was done in a post in the near future. More images here.
Labels: HDR
